'The Best Man Holiday' review: The plot thickened

Published 3:38 pm, Thursday, November 14, 2013

Harper (Taye Diggs, left) hopes to get help from football star Lance (Morris Chestnut) and wife Mia (Monica Calhoun) in "The Best Man Holiday."

Harper (Taye Diggs, left) hopes to get help from football star Lance (Morris Chestnut) and wife Mia (Monica Calhoun) in "The Best Man Holiday."

Photo: Michael Gibson, Universal Pictures

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(L to R) Lance (MORRIS CHESTNUT), Harper (TAYE DIGGS), Julian (HAROLD PERRINEAU) and Quentin (TERRENCE HOWARD) share a laugh in "The Best Man Holiday", the long-awaited next chapter to the film that ushered in a new era of comedy. When the college friends finally reunite over the Christmas holidays, they will discover just how easy it is for long-forgotten rivalries and passionate romances to be reignited. less

(L to R) Lance (MORRIS CHESTNUT), Harper (TAYE DIGGS), Julian (HAROLD PERRINEAU) and Quentin (TERRENCE HOWARD) share a laugh in "The Best Man Holiday", the long-awaited next chapter to the film that ushered in ... more

Photo: Michael Gibson, Universal Pictures

Image 3 of 3

(L to R) Quentin (TERRENCE HOWARD), Jordan (NIA LONG) and Brian (EDDIE CIBRIAN) in "The Best Man Holiday", the long-awaited next chapter to the film that ushered in a new era of comedy. When the college friends finally reunite over the Christmas holidays, they will discover just how easy it is for long-forgotten rivalries and passionate romances to be reignited. less

(L to R) Quentin (TERRENCE HOWARD), Jordan (NIA LONG) and Brian (EDDIE CIBRIAN) in "The Best Man Holiday", the long-awaited next chapter to the film that ushered in a new era of comedy. When the college friends ... more

Photo: Michael Gibson, Universal Pictures

'The Best Man Holiday' review: The plot thickened

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The Best Man Holiday

The people in "The Best Man Holiday" - not just the actors, but the characters they play - deserved a better script than this. That's an odd thing to say or even think, because if we know these characters only through the script, and if we care about the characters enough to want good things for them, then the script can't be all bad.

And it's not all bad. It's just part bad: It suffers from cliches and corniness, from the same kinds of scenes played over and over, and from more false endings than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie. Even its first moments are clumsy, with a credits sequence in which we're introduced to eight characters and are expected to track who is who, who is with whom and what they all do for a living. Throughout, writer-director Malcolm D. Lee hurries up when he needs to take his time and lavishes time on scenes he doesn't need. And yet, "The Best Man Holiday" has something.

It introduces us to a group of people who are complex and engaging, and it places those people in relationships that are believable. These characters, all of them black professionals in their early 40s - all of them friends for years - come together for a long Christmas weekend. The hosts are a football star (Morris Chestnut), soon to retire, and his saintly wife, Mia (Monica Calhoun). But our doorway into the story is Harper (Taye Diggs), a former best-selling novelist who has hit a financial wall, just as his wife (Sanaa Lathan) is about to give birth to their first child.

In brutal succession, Harper loses his teaching gig at NYU and finds out that his new novel has no takers. His only shot at a big payday is to persuade his football star friend to let him ghost his autobiography - a prospect complicated by the fact that he and his former best buddy have been estranged for years.

The movie is at its best in the first hour, as we follow Harper and experience, through him, the awkwardness of having to maintain a successful facade while he experiences the internal humiliation of scheming for a writing assignment he considers beneath him. Lee knows that, even among close friends, there is often an implied hierarchy determined by one's professional success, and he conveys this with precision and subtlety.

But then "The Best Man Holiday" takes its focus off of Harper's tensions and charges headlong into what the filmmaker probably thinks of as a more emotional and affecting direction - and it is, in a way. There are some heartrending moments. But mostly the last half of the film is boilerplate tearjerker, with scenes you've seen over and over in other, better movies, and with dialogue that's occasionally cringe-inducing.

The last half hour is a complete mess, but a weird experience, too, in even after we give up on the movie, we don't give up on the characters. It's as if the story's collapse isn't just our misfortune as spectators, but theirs, too.

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